The novelist sighed. Romance is the hardest genre, she thought as she stared at the white screen in front of her. It made her furious when people and so-called critics told her that romance was a genre reliant upon tired tropes and clichés. They were wrong. It was an art-form, a science. Scaring people? Easy! Making them laugh? Child’s play. Making them swoon with love and have horny dreams about being stolen away by pirates or marrying a billionaire? The most challenging task of all.

“I wanna be a billionaire, so freaking bad…” Yaritza hummed the catchy tune to herself while scrolling through the WikiHow page “How to Embezzle Money” on her middle-class 11.6″ MacBook Air while sitting in her middle-class 448 square-feet studio in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, across the Central Park and a few subway stops to the Wall Street in the Financial District. She hated the small laptop, her tiny apartment, and her middle-class life. She had always wanted to be rich. All things considered, she just knew in her heart that embezzling money was the only sure way for her to afford a lavish life. A sumptuous surrealism kind of life.

When they asked me to say a few words at Gary’s retirement party, I was nervous. I’m not much of a public speaker. But when I started to think of what I’d say, I got nostalgic. Gary and I go way back. We started together at the County in the Payroll Division 26 years ago. We were young men then, in our early thirties. Both of us had left the private sector to take our first government jobs. This was back when government work was still considered honorable, ha, ha. We were itching to show everyone what we knew. We had full heads of hair back then, too, believe it or not. We learned the ropes together